Reading this New York Times commentary on the "a Genie Unbottled" and the sort of uncomfortable schadenfreud on the American Left with respect to the Bush Administration scoring an own goal, it strikes me that there is rather too much chicken-littlism and rather too little careful thought about useful leverage and positions emerging. Or potentially so.

The World
A Little Democracy or a Genie Unbottled
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: January 29, 2006

THE overwhelming sense among politicians and intellectuals in the Middle East last week was that America's little chemistry experiment had blown up in its face. President Bush promoted democracy and free elections as his primary solution to the region's ills — and when Hamas won in a landslide in the Palestinian elections, the president got results that could not have been more inimical to the interests of the United States and its ally, Israel.

Well, certainly that is the apparent gut reaction, although unless one was intolerably dim or wrapped in a bubble of spin, the results should not have been a great surprise.

That being said, the core challenge in such an instance is what can be built.

Liberal politics out of this democracy is a pipe dream.

Would liberal economics (or something vaguely approaching it) be possible? That is, can Hamas put together a non-kleptocracy?

That's the same question that arises across the region (more hopefully than in the case of the Palestinian Bantustans.

Like a powerful catalyst best handled with an eyedropper rather than a ladle, free and fair elections have recently unleashed political forces elsewhere in the region that can hardly be seen as friendly to the United States. The radical Muslim Brotherhood made major gains in Egypt's parliamentary elections, a Shiite clerical list allied with Iran won a plurality in Iraq and Hezbollah — considered, like Hamas, a terrorist organization by the West — surged in last year's elections in Lebanon.

From one point of view, one that produces more than a few chortles in the Middle East, the United States has fallen victim to some grand law of unintended consequences. "You might remember the saying, 'Beware of what you wish — you might get what you want,' " said Abdel Monem Said Aly, director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, well aware that he was tossing a Western saying back in the direction it came. "It's very much applicable," he said.

However, in my mind, the issue is whether there are going to be long term benefits of democracy, but whether from the Islamist power bases, a stable and relatively honest power broker can emerge, illiberal to be sure on the side of personal rights, but carrying enough institutional strength, enough coherency and legitimacy to enable the real roots of liberalism to find some reasonable soil.

Economic liberalism, at least domestic, needs, perhaps a bit of illiberal toughness at the start to help insure against mob rule in the realm of property and the like.

Perhaps the Islamists can provide it. Presuming they can be weened off of the influences of the bizarro Islamo-socialism of the 60-70s that still crops up.

As to this, I have more than a few issues with the organisation

If the catalytic reaction set in motion by elections cannot be stopped once it starts, then a better solution may be to promote democracy in a way that is tailored to the most dangerous realities of each country. Marina Ottaway, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, divides countries into three categories that highlight what can most readily go wrong for Western interests when democracy is thrown into the mix in the Middle East and the wider Arab world.

In one set of countries, including Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, a ruling authoritarian regime is considered ineffectual or corrupt and Islamic opposition parties would probably sweep any wide-open elections as good-government candidates.

In a second set, which includes Iraq and Lebanon, the underlying peril is an ethnically and religiously splintered populace, held together only by an autocrat's heavy hand, in which the differences threaten to tear the countries apart. Here, rival religious groups often have their own parties and militias.

Open elections in a third group — pro-Western monarchies like Jordan, Kuwait or Bahrain — would probably overturn the existing semi-feudal social order in favor of Islamic rule, Ms. Ottaway said. In these cases, Islam's appeal is based on a claim that it creates a just social order.

Set one doesn't make sense to me. Morocco and Tunisia, whatever their issues, are nowhere near the problems of Egypt with respect to the delegimitisation of the ruling regimes. Tunisia's regime is hardly considered incompetent. Mean, getting more and more corrupt, but largely competent. Morocco... well there you've got incompetent and corrupt, but with a new nice face on things that has real legitimacy. Egypt.....

Second category is sensible.

Third, I frankly would put Jordan in the same category as Morocco.. Perhaps the journo confused Algeria and Morocco.

The ascendancy throughout the region of political Islam is, therefore, the first problem that the United States must solve as it pushes democratic reform.

"I don't think the United States is prepared to deal with the issue of these Islamist parties," Ms. Ottaway said.

Nevertheless, the problem is not as fraught as Americans often make it out to be, she said. The appeal of the Islamist parties is often simply that they are well organized, untainted by the corruption of an entrenched regime, and able to provide things like child care and funeral services to local neighborhoods. Several political experts said that disgust with the inefficient government run by Fatah, the former ruling party in Palestine, and its reputation for corruption, played a much greater role in the Hamas landslide than attitudes about Israel.

Precisely on the last paragraph.

However, underplaying the religious dimension is an error. The mixture of religious and secular appeal is a winner, and as long as they are excluded, the mystique can only grow.
On this
As for the countries like Lebanon and Iraq that are plagued with sectarian and religious divides, Mr. Baram is another believer that carefully designed forms of democracy will be able to work there. In Lebanon, each group, from the Maronites to the Shiites, is allocated a fixed number of seats, district by district, to prevent sudden shifts in power that could provoke a return to civil war.

I love how the Lebanese always thing their mad little system makes sense. Only insofar as everyone is afraid to change it. For time being.

"It has to be approached on a country-by-country solution," Mr. Baram said. He said that in Iraq, where the voting produced a Shiite plurality but forced the main clerical party to seek partners in its government, the arrangement could in the long run produce a stable country much like Lebanon appears to have become. Others see in Iraq the potential for a civil war — in the style of what Lebanon went through just 20 years ago — that creates separate Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni regions and generates spinoff conflicts in the entire region.

Many political commentators in the Middle East, including Rami Khouri, a syndicated columnist and editor at large at the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut, say that Mr. Bush's seemingly contradictory statements show that he is not really serious about pushing democracy. Instead, Mr. Khouri believes, talk of democracy is a cover for an invasion of Iraq that happened for other reasons.

On the last, well yes. Easy talk, not well thought through.

However, a cold pragmatic look at home to take an illiberal base and lay some foundations for at least real economic liberalism is possible.